PRIMAL SCREED/James McCarty Yeager

Auguries of the Inaugural

Washington, D.C.

Thanks to the Dred Gore decision, the long national
nightmare has begun. Just in case you were wondering, it's all your
fault. Mine too, but yours, don't forget. For not believing enough in
the Republican dream of a country where meat-gorging, beer-swilling,
child-beating, church-going, tax-escaping, freely-gunned,
mass-execution-causing, voucher-paid privately-educated white
suburban citizens make money together, they had to take the election
away from us.

Now they're supposed to have achieved the allegiance of the
doubting majority on Electoral Disgrace Day, I mean, January 20th. It
was being said by certain establishment journalists that Snippy had a
good inaugural address because it was written by Michael Gerson, the
ex-US Snooze reporter who wrote his convention acceptance speech.
Somehow this was supposed to translate into a new dawn in the White
House, etc.

Pardon while I puke. The Republicans have a long history of
writing good speeches to be delivered by talking dummies, e.g.
Eisenhower, Reagan, Poppy, and now Snippy. I'd prefer to be surprised
by Snippy turning out better than his antecedents, practices, and
method of ascension give us any right to expect, rather than by any
puffs of breath he might have managed to mouth.

We have here an administration of all the talents, as it used to
be called in Europe whenever the King was weak. The weakest of all
Kings were boys whose natural immature tendency to govern according
to personal whim had to be restrained by more experienced hands. The
Kingdom would be run by a Regent, or Council of Regents. They were
usually uncles or brothers-in-law, as who should say, mentors. They
acted in the King's name. Made war, or peace, or levied taxes, or
regulated trade, or put down citizen uprisings. Or caused them, as
the case may be. As the nobles fought for the ear of the Regent, the
incapable King himself became merely a body over the possession of
which conflicting powers struggled.

The Republicans have already had a Regency in the House for two
years, where Speaker Dennis (Invertebrate) Hastert is a figurehead
manipulated by Majority Whip DDTom Delay. Now Snippy, who seems proud
of keeping to the inert working schedule he established in Austin,
has so many mentors that you wonder how he'll have time to learn from
any of them.

Shakespeare's sense of order led him to excoriate Regencies as
being an inherently unstable form of government. Four of his plays
especially illustrate these evils: Measure for Measure and the
three parts of Henry VI. In Henry VI Parts I, II and
III the evil facing the state, which neither King nor Regents are
strong enough to handle, is loss of foreign empire and infighting
that leads to civil war and rebellion. In Measure for Measure
the Duke deputizes his favorite courtier to run the state while the
real Duke leaves for awhile. Power immediately goes to the courtier's
head and he capriciously uses his official status to satisfy personal
preferences. The state is thrown into turmoil because the Duke
wouldn't, and the Regent couldn't, do his job. Shakespeare always
favored the discipline of consequences, a rigor that might well soon
be contemplated by His Disreputability, the Inferior Justice of the
Inferior Court, and others in his debt.

This administration's attempts at disaster avoidance will, I
trust, prove amusing, though they cannot prove successful. The
fatally weakened presidency the Republicans wanted to achieve with
Clinton has finally arrived with Snippy. Meantime, it is too soon to
tell where disaster will strike. As Hobbes said to Calvin, we can't
question his integrity until we have some evidence of it. But certain
fault lines may prove predictive.

First, it is probable-to-certain that US troops will be killing
foreign civilians and troops within 18 months. The only question is,
where? It could be in Colombia, where the population has been
sufficiently demonized as narco-terrorists that US media would not
notice until tens of thousands of natives, or one American soldier,
had been killed. It may be in Afghanistan, where the anti-Muslim
propaganda machine (see media, above) has identified Osama bin Laden
as a worth target for US bullets or, failing him, anybody that gets
in the way. Or will it be Iraq, where Saddam Hussein is the heir to
Muhammar Qadaffi and the Ayatollah Khomeini as the US Cartoon Villain
Figure Numero Uno? Which war first? Or will it be more than one? I'm
sure they'll let Snippy know just as soon as they tell the rest of
us.

Second, despite their haste to declare, and even cause, a
recession in order to restore growth by reelection time, the
Republicans' favored tax cut medicine will only make the disease
worse. This won't stop them, but the Democrats just might, more out
of contrariness than any economic understanding of the necessity for
infrastructural spending in time of recession.

Third, some point during the statutory 96 months of this
administration is likely to witness the replacement of either Snippy
or Cheney. The probable causes are heart attack, hunting accident,
impeachment, or addiction. Snippy and Cheney have 3 DWI arrests
between them, though they are safe from that since they will be
Secret Service driven from now on.

Public Disgust Department

A spate of new terms has greeted Snippy's well-documented habit of
diminishing newsmen by giving them nicknames. We, the people, have
started returning the favor with such vigor that there are already
more popularly-generated names for Snippy than there were for Clinton
at the end of his first term. By the end of his single term Snippy
may well turn out to have more nicknames than he has personality to
go with them.